The port is maintained by Randy Heit, Graf Zahl, and Blzut3. The large number of editing features supported by ZDoom have made it a port of choice for several independent game projects, notably Foreverhood, Action Doom 2: Urban Brawl, Chex Quest 3, and Harmony. ZDoom has also served as a popular code base to build upon, with numerous other source ports derived from it or using portions of its code. Many in the Doom community use development versions of the port before they are officially released as stable builds.

A chasecam and many camera effects, including Duke Nukem-style security camera and Unreal-style skyboxes. Cameras can replace the player view, allowing for scripted cutscenes or alternative gameplay, such as mimicking a sidescroller.

Support for using the features of every Doom engine game in all of them — for example, a Doom map can feature Strife conversations, Hexen scripting and actors that use Heretic codepointers.

Support for loading resources directly from ZIP (.pk3) or 7z (.pk7) files, making the use of the traditional WAD file format optional except for map lumps.